In this powerful episode of Digital Gold, JohnPaul Baric sits down with Dennis Porter, CEO of Satoshi Action Fund, to unpack how Bitcoin mining is becoming a pivotal energy tool, not just a financial one. From saving lives in Texas winter storms to enabling energy development in Africa and rural America, Dennis explains why Bitcoin is a partner, not a parasite, to the grid. They also dive into hot-button topics like stablecoins surpassing Visa, Tether’s shocking profits compared to BlackRock, and what Dennis sees coming by 2030. This episode is a masterclass for energy entrepreneurs, policymakers, and investors who want to understand the real economic and environmental value behind Bitcoin infrastructure and why the time to build is now. Enjoyed the episode? If this conversation brought you new insights, we’d love for you to leave a review, it helps more Bitcoin enthusiasts and professionals discover the show. Have a guest you'd like to hear from or a topic you want us to explore? Drop your suggestions in the comments. We’re building this podcast with and for the mining community.
In this episode of Digital Gold, JohnPaul Baric sits down with Dennis Porter, CEO of Satoshi Action Fund, to unpack how Bitcoin mining is becoming a pivotal energy tool, not just a financial one.
From saving lives in Texas winter storms to enabling energy development in Africa and rural America, Dennis explains why Bitcoin is a partner, not a parasite, to the grid. They also dive into hot-button topics like stablecoins surpassing Visa, Tether’s shocking profits compared to BlackRock, and what Dennis sees coming by 2030.
This episode is a masterclass for energy entrepreneurs, policymakers, and investors who want to understand the real economic and environmental value behind Bitcoin infrastructure and why the time to build is now.
Enjoyed the episode?
If this conversation brought you new insights, we’d love for you to leave a review, it helps more Bitcoin enthusiasts and professionals discover the show.
Have a guest you'd like to hear from or a topic you want us to explore? Drop your suggestions in the comments. We’re building this podcast with and for the mining community.
Episode breakdown:
00:00 – Intro & Dennis’s Journey
How Dennis discovered Bitcoin and transitioned from finance to advocacy.
06:00 – The Political Wake-Up Call
How regulation threats led to the founding of Satoshi Action Fund.
12:00 – Right to Mine & Digital Asset Rights
Early wins, state legislation, and what’s at stake for 20M+ Americans.
18:00 – Bitcoin’s Role in the Grid
How mining supports grid resilience, clean energy, and rural revitalization.
26:00 – Peaker Plants vs. Bitcoin Miners
Breaking down the economics and emissions of flexible load vs. legacy infrastructure.
31:00 – Vision 2030: Bitcoin as an Energy Development Tool
The future of global power generation with Bitcoin as the buyer of last resort.
36:00 – Global Impact: Africa, Poverty, and Power Access
Why Bitcoin can unlock prosperity for billions through energy inclusion.
44:00 – Federal Involvement & Methane Mitigation
Should the U.S. back Bitcoin mining? And how it reduces environmental harm.
52:00 – Stablecoins, Tether, and Yield Politics
Why stablecoins are shaking up traditional finance and who’s trying to stop it.
59:00 – How to Take Action
Grassroots advocacy tips and how individuals can influence real policy.
1:06:00 – Final Thoughts & Dennis’s Vision
A call to builders, advocates, and listeners to shape the future of Bitcoin.
Dennis Porter
Jp: [00:00:00] Welcome to Digital Gold, the podcast exploring Bitcoin mining's transformative approach to power and energy. Today we're joined by Dennis Porter, CEO, and co-founder of the Satoshi Action Fund, president of Satoshi Action Education, and a leading advocate for Bitcoin's role in energy innovation and policy reform. With a background in finance and tech startups, Dennis educates lawmakers on Bitcoin, mining's potential to stabilize energy grids, reduce emissions through methane mitigation and foster economic growth. He's been instrumental in passing pro mining legislation in states like Texas, Oklahoma, and Montana.
And his insights have been featured in Forbes, CoinDesk, and Major Bitcoin conferences. We'll dive into how Bitcoin mining can reshape energy infrastructure, why smart policy matters for US leadership and blockchain in the future of decentralized technology. Dennis, welcome to Digital Gold. It's good to have you.
Dennis: It's great to be here. Always good to see you. I know some people will probably only listen to the audio version, always good to see a friendly face. Jp.
Jp: Thanks. I'm excited to talk to you more about what is the [00:01:00] DC in Politics of Mining. As you know, someone who's building the space, we focus on the energy and deploying, but every day it seems like we're pushing up against more and more political and regulatory hurdles. So excited to, to jump into those. So, Dennis, what made you want to do this? Walk us through starting off in your early career in finance and startup, and then what was the pivotal moment that sparked that transition into Bitcoin advocacy for yourself?
Dennis: Yeah, absolutely. The big thing was I found Bitcoin in 2017 after sort of trying to find, jumping from one thing to the next, trying to find what the next thing would be for me. And I found Bitcoin in 2017 because a friend of mine told me it was perfectly anonymous internet money.
And I said, no way. That's not possible. Nothing on the internet is like totally anonymous. So, I went to go study Bitcoin right away immediately to prove my friend wrong. But while I was in there studying Bitcoin and learning about. If whether it could or couldn't be, perfectly anonymous internet money, which of course everyone in the space knows it's not perfectly anonymous.
I found so many things about Bitcoin that I truly fell in love with. I fell in [00:02:00] love with the ability for Bitcoin to be a peer-to-peer technology, to be able to bank the unbanked, to provide financial services for people globally, for people that have been traditionally left out of those systems. And I just started to fall in love with the technology. Even though I don't know, code or I'm not a coder, I'm not a expert when it comes to technical components of Bitcoin even today, I would say. But at the time knew nothing about Bitcoin and nothing about coding, and yet I just dove right into mastering Bitcoin by Andrea Opolais. I had to read it probably three or four times before it started to make sense.
It sounded a lot like a foreign language to me, which at time, at the time it was. But, that kind of research and then just going online and just seeing the thriving community of people that were standing up and defending Bitcoin and sharing their views on Bitcoin, which helped to educate my views on Bitcoin as well, ultimately led me to a scenario where I knew that I wanted to do something in this space.
Initially in 2017, going into 2018, I was like, you know what? I'm gonna launch a code. I'm gonna launch an app. I am going to create something for people. And then I learned very quickly and reminded myself why I was really bad in school. For those of you that dunno me, [00:03:00] don't even have a high school diploma.
I have a GED did a little bit of college, but it just really wasn't my thing. And, , trying to learn to code reminded me of how much I hated, going to school and it just wasn't a good fit for me. So I was like, you know what? Okay, scrap that idea. First idea is never the good one, right? You go, I went right into mining and so I started mining outta my basement.
I. And it was a really fun time learning how to deal with all of the intricacies that a mining operation can entail. And that is, learning what to do with the sound, learning what to do with the excess heat, learning how to reduce my power bill so that I could increase my profit margin. Learning how to use the software and the firmwares that go along with Bitcoin mining.
And I even built my own, black box, so to speak, for those that, are familiar with upstream data. They have this little black box and you put it outside and it's very much nicer than the one I built, but mine was indoor only, but built that so I could stick it out the side of my garage. 'cause there was way too much heat.
And was about to go all in on bitcoin mining. And then eventually the market collapsed. And I was like, okay, I clearly don't know what's going on here and I, I need to study this a little bit more so I can prepare for a true entry to the space. [00:04:00] Went pretty quiet for a while, right? 2017 to about 2020.
I. I didn't try to make any big moves into this space. Just continue to learn, continue to educate myself. And then eventually when the new cycle started coming back around, I saw Michael Sailor jumping in. I saw the talk of institutions coming in and I realized I gotta do something again before this cycle takes off.
I, this is the time to shine. , just like most people out there who don't have much shelves to put into the space, or I'm not sure , how they can add value outside of just like talking about Bitcoin, I was like, you know what? I'm just gonna become a content creator. I'm going to focus on educating people about this technology.
I'm gonna focus on delivering real high value content. I was able to get some of the best speakers, the entire space, everything from sitting Senators to Michael Saylor to you name it. I was able to get them on my show and had an awesome time doing that. But eventually started to circle back to this idea that like, you know what?
I wanna really do something in the space. And although there was a lot of value that I was creating in my show, I didn't feel like I was actually doing something myself. I was hearing a lot and talking a lot about what other people were doing in the [00:05:00] space. So I had that thought sitting in the back of my head, going into about 2022 and,
also at the same time, I noticed there was a lot of political activity taking off in the space. Like people all of a sudden were paying a lot attention to the political components of Bitcoin, but I didn't think we were paying enough attention to it. And so we started kind of yelling and screaming into the void how we need to get active.
We need to educate lawmakers, we need to get 'em on our team so that we can have a country that is very pro Bitcoin and very proco mining. Eventually there was attack on Bitcoin, you could call it that. Maybe it was intentional, maybe it's unintentional, but it came through the Infrastructure and Jobs Act.
It was a huge problem for the space. And that's what galvanized so many people to realize like, oh my gosh, like we do really need to pay attention to what's going on in Washington DC and in the political space because if we don't, we can get hit sideways and be put in a really bad situation with our ability to use the technology and , to be able to engage in building a business in the space.
So that galvanized a lot of support around people getting politically active. And people just kept telling me over and over, you really need to go all in the space. You need to launch something. And so that was the impetus, I should say, for the launch of Satoshi [00:06:00] action, which launched in June of 2022.
And happy to share more about Satoshi action, but that's just, how I got started in the space and what led me to getting political.
Jp: Dennis, for those people that are not this policy, can you speak on what the policy was that everyone started freaking out about?
Dennis: Yeah, the IIJA had an issue in there where they wanted to essentially regulate everybody in the space as brokers, which would mean that you'd have to go through the same financial regulatory steps as like a bank or a very large stock exchange. And that's just not really possible for the average person.
Like if you just want custody or Bitcoin, if you just wanna mind Bitcoin, you should not have to comply to the same standards that a bank has to meet because you're not performing the same services they are. But because they didn't either, either it was an intentional attack or they just didn't understand the technology enough, it's like putting square peg in a round hole.
they pushed this policy forward and actually got it pushed pretty far, and for the most part, kept most of it intact and passed it into law. Fortunately, I would say, smarter minds prevailed and some folks didn't actually push to. Pushed , the regulations that were passed into law onto the [00:07:00] greater space.
But it did end up passing into law and that's what freaked everybody out. So that's what got everyone excited to be much more politically active and start engaging lawmakers to help them understand why this type of policy matters or why engaging in the policy process matters and why instead of just fighting back against policy, we can also go out and enact our own policy.
And that's a big part of what, how Satoshi action operates is we care a lot about scoring wins for Bitcoin and the digital asset ecosystem. We don't just wanna play defense if, 'cause if we're playing defense all the time, ultimately we're only gonna be on guard. And if you're only on guard the whole time, it's like playing a game of soccer.
If you're only guarding the goal the whole time, you might not have very many points scored on you, but you'll never score any points of your own. And so we need to go on offense. Just like any sports game you need to be on offense to score points. So we gotta go on offense, score some wins for Bitcoin and digital assets.
We've done that since launching Satoshi action. We've passed we're on the. The edge of passing our seventh bill into law. Six bills have already been passed into law so far, protecting the rights of 20 million Americans to engage in Bitcoin digital asset transactions, [00:08:00] to hold Bitcoin to self-custody.
Bitcoin in some states there's rights around protecting the mining of Bitcoin using a node for, the Bitcoin digital asset ecosystem. All these things are now protected, for roughly 20 million Americans, and that number is gonna just continue to grow as we pass more of these bills in more states.
Jp: And to your point, you have to be on the offense because the way the states are set up and the system set up is that there's so many levels of compliance that if you don't have clarity or if you have group who wants to push for, let's say control over a sector that you then get looped into, like, now I'm gonna have to act like a bank. That creates a huge headache for everyone trying to do business and hire people and build this industry farther forward. So you launched the Right to Mind bills. Was that the first bill that you kind of put out into the public and can you talk about what the of that bill was and maybe the challenges of getting it to getting it passed?
Dennis: Yeah, absolutely. So the Rights of Mind Bill was our very first, I would say model policy that [00:09:00] was very successful. We had a couple other models we tried to work with, and for people that aren't familiar with the policy process, the basic premise of a model is that a group of people, , could be corporates, could be individuals, could be advocates, could be policy professionals.
They'll get together and they'll say, you know what? This is what we think the law should look like. And then you take that model law and you hand it over to lawmakers and you say, you know, these are some of our ideas and these are what we think you should, pass into law. And that is one of our core focuses as an organization, is that we craft these model policies and then hand them to lawmakers and help actually walk them through the process of getting those bills passed into law.
And the very first time we did that was with a bill called Right to Mind. That was what we, called it because that was essentially what the bill does. We had seen a lot of attacks on Bitcoin mining across the country. Across the world really, but across the country, we were seeing, people trying to restrict the ability for Bitcoin miners to operate by making zoning changes, like doing weird rules around zoning, changing zoning laws. There was a group in Montana that had a multimillion-dollar project go completely bankrupt because they changed the zoning on [00:10:00] where they were trying to build. And so they were not able to build that there because at the last minute they had this emergency meeting, we were like, oh, we're gonna change these zoning laws, so you can't build your Bitcoin mine here.
Same thing with, basically with, noise problems. Obviously, Bitcoin, minings. Make my mind does create a lot of noise that is known. That's fine. I get that. , there are ways to mitigate that and people definitely should mitigate it. We've been on the front lines of telling minors, you really gotta make sure you're on top of this and not let it become a major problem in your community.
But what was happening is because it was an easy attack factor, there was local jurisdictions that would try to pass aggressive noise ordinances, specifically targeting Bitcoin miners. And they'd have to meet a lower threshold than like anybody, including other industries.
And there are other industries that are much louder than Bitcoin mining, but it was this easy attack vector. We saw a lot of hit pieces coming out about it. And so the right to Mind Bill also protects against discriminatory Noise ordinances. Those are the two major components of the legislation. Of course, there's also a part around discriminatory, energy rates, which we saw in the state of Idaho.
They tried to create, well, they did create a discriminatory, energy rate for Bitcoin [00:11:00] miners. And we fought back against that, and that became included in part of , our grander bill. And we ultimately passed that legislation into law in our first year in Montana and in Arkansas. , to a lot of people's frustration, there was even actually attempts to repeal the law that we passed because people were so upset about it.
In the state of Arkansas, we successfully prevented, , the major repeal of the most important parts of that legislation, but there's definitely been real world attacks on Bitcoin mining and they're continuing to take place, and that's why that became a major focus for us as an organization.
Since then, we've gone on to expand into what we call digital asset rights. So it was right to mind, and then it became digital asset rights. So instead of just protecting the right to mind. We wanted to protect the right to self-custody, the right to run a node, you name it, I, solicited 'em all earlier in the show.
But that is the second core piece of policy that we've had, and that was passed now in four states. So six states total, if you do right to mind twice on digital asset rights, four times. And that covers literally over 20 million Americans today.
Jp: And to your point, that is amazing because as a small miner, as a miner in any of these states, you [00:12:00] are feeling, let's say you must collaborate with local zoning officials, local city officials, local county officials, permitting officials, and then the energy company. And so there's plenty of places for bias to fall into decision making and policy and procedures. So how do you take this thing that sounded like a foreign language to you in 2017 to. These policy makers, how do you help them grasp the benefit of Bitcoin mining to their community, to their energy grid? The benefit of digital asset rights. And can you talk about any, maybe metaphors you use to explain Bitcoin mining, , to policy makers or just digital assets in general?
Dennis: Absolutely. So, I mean, it really came down to that time, that period of time that I had to just educate myself, learn about the technology from 2017 to 2020. And then of course, having the show that I had previously, I would have a lot of great guests on. So, I got to learn a lot that way as well. And then eventually I just really became very focused [00:13:00] on defending the technology through social media.
, at the time my social media had started to kind of take off and so I started using my voice to come up with reasons for why Bitcoin mining was so valuable , and trying to craft it in a way that was. Understandable to the average person because this is a very technical space and, it's a new space.
I think once you really get your head wrapped around it, it's not too hard to understand. But any new subject matter is gonna be difficult for anyone to comprehend or to jump into. So I'd always try to dumb it down as much as possible, make it like five level, like a preschool level reading practically, for these folks.
And that really catered well to the eventual engagement in the political space because a lot of these lawmakers, most lawmakers are 45, 50 plus. When you're coming to them to talk about a new technology, you have to be able to explain it in a way that it makes sense for them. And that's true with any new technology, not just Bitcoin mining.
But the thing that we did is we started to talk about Bitcoin mining as a huge value add to the grid, to the huge value add , to clean energy. And it is, if Bitcoin Mining is one of the most powerful grid balancing technologies on the earth, on the planet, and it [00:14:00] can be used to help.
To provide backup services to the grid when there is an emergency, , it can be used to help provide, ancillary services to the grid when there are sort of very, very short but severe changes in what's called frequency. Obviously, gets a little bit technical when you talk about frequency, but the basic premise is the grid is constantly fluctuating and you have to have someone that can come in and to fill that void when it goes up or down too quickly, because if it does, the grid can collapse.
Same thing, , with the clean energy side of things, wind and solar are variable. Renewable energy is what they're called, right? Like that is the name of the technology that is used amongst industry insiders. It's inherently variable, but the problem with being a variable energy source is when you stop producing energy for the grid, then.
People aren't gonna stop buying energy, they're just gonna continue going on. And so what you can do is you can have Bitcoin mining play a really big role in supporting clean energy by being a variable load because you have variable generation mattress variable load that's really valuable for clean energy.
But also because oftentimes wind and solar is placed in extremely , remote parts of the world, [00:15:00] it's very far away from city centers. Every time you see a solar plant or a wind farm, like it's, you're never close to a city like most of the time when you see these really, really big farms.
And so what you have to do is you have to transmit that power over very large distances back to where people actually buy the power. While lo and behold, building these really, really long power lines, which are called high voltage transmission lines over large distances. Beca has been much more difficult than people predicted. One reason right off the bat is that you have to essentially take people's land from them in order to build the lines over those large distances. They're an eyesore, they're very expensive. So, there's been a lot of pushback on the expansion of high voltage transmission lines in the United States, and that has bottlenecked, a lot of clean energy, wind, and solar.
It's caused a lot of wind and solar energy to be what they call stranded, where it just can't get to market. And so a really great thing that Bitcoin mining can do there is it can go in and it can be co-located right next to the wind and solar because unlike traditional data centers, you can put these things.
Bitcoin mining, you can put 'em basically anywhere. Like it doesn't really matter as long as you can get access to it some way, even if it's a dirt road. Especially with the [00:16:00] advent of starlink, things like this where you're able to connect remotely from pretty much anywhere in the world. You can have a Bitcoin mine virtually anywhere in the world.
And so if you have a solar farm in the middle of nowhere, can't get the energy to market, you can place a Bitcoin mine right next to it and monetize 100% of the energy that they haven't been able to sell, which is called curtailed energy. And there is a lot of curtailed energy. I mean, it's incredible amount of curtailed energy.
If you go to California ISO's website, which is the people that operate statewide grid, they track all the curtailment that they have each year. And California is on track right now to curtail more energy by 2030 than the bottom 36 nations combined. So it's a massive amount of power that they are curtailing and that they're not selling, and it's bad for those clean energy providers.
It's bad for rate payers. I won't get into the details of why, but ultimately by having that Bitcoin mine come in and be placed right next to it, you can solve this problem permanently for the clean energy space.
Jp: And it's bad for rate payers because you're incentivizing energy that no one is consuming,
You're creating these. [00:17:00] False incentives in a market, which we have seen with, I'll jump into like the federal, , infrastructure Act has been great to lower the cost of energy in the market, but there's now a regulatory kind of like hurdle for consumers to access this because of the current structure of how cooperatives and market makers buy power from these energy markets, which is SPP Miso Kaiso, as you mentioned. So we have this divide of federal policy, which subsidized energy rates in the us which is a net positive for an energy consumers and should result in lower rates for Americans. But then you have most Americans who are expecting a higher energy bill next year because of all these other inflated costs. I know we're, not talking necessarily fully about changing the energy grid here, Dennis, but how do you see the grid, I guess, . Changing with the times of cheaper LMPs, but then the problem being accessing those LMPs , for communities that are in bigger cities, but communities that are [00:18:00] local to the LMP should have , very cheap energy. , and , , when will the politicians or when will groups start advocating for accessing these LMPs? Are you seeing anything on that front , at the moment?
Dennis: I am not seeing a big movement on that front. At least not in the work that we're involved in, but certainly I agree with you that to an extent, , we subsidize wind and solar and the people that are subsidizing it are rate payers. And so whenever these wind farms or solar farms, which I like it, I like clean energy, I think it's a great resource.
But whenever they are not selling their power, the way that they stay operational, at least barely operational, right? Because they're not getting paid as much as they could be getting paid. But the way that they stay operational , and not sell all their power is , there's a subsidized program through that, through things like capacity markets, for instance.
Like if you just have power available, the grid will pay you for it, even if you don't sell it, which is a great way to make sure that you can expand wind and solar. But the problem is that we've seen so much of that. Without the actual transmission lines coming in to solve the problem of deliverability, that it's caused rates to go up for people across the country.
And now people are starting to point the finger [00:19:00] at wind and solar, which it's not technically the wind and solar energy industry's fault. It's more so the outcomes of the policy. Like we predicted that this problem would've been solved many years ago to get the power to market and we just haven't been able to get it done.
And so that's a really important component where I think, interestingly enough, like instead of having the rate payers through policy set by the federal government or state policy, instead of having the rate payers subsidize wind and solar, you can essentially have the Bitcoin mining, subsidizing wind and solar by buying up all the excess energy that they can't sell.
And this is something that I've been talking about over and over again. And finally I've been actually able to talk to some generators, some wind and solar generators. Consistently where they've been like, yeah, actually this is great. We love this. This is such a good idea. It's been so hard to break into that space though, because when I first started in June of 2022 fighting for Bitcoin mining, there was such a negative connotation around Bitcoin mining that it was hard to even get into a room.
It's hard to even have a conversation with anyone because they'd read the New York Times or they'd read wherever they're seeing these hit pieces and they would want nothing to do with it. , and so that has been a [00:20:00] major holdback, but we're starting to see a little bit of that focus around the energy concerns of Bitcoin mining shift over to the AI space and a lot of that coverage as well around the concerns of energy consumption.
And so it's opened the door and enabled more folks to pay attention to the space. And obviously, of course, also Bitcoin mining has matured as an industry quite a bit. So the players in the space are much better at engaging folks in the energy world, where I think you're gonna continue to see emerging of those two worlds, as time goes on.
Jp: So what's one of the most persistent myths that you see people, either policy makers, energy companies believing about Bitcoin mining and how do you dismantle it? Is it the energy concerns? Is it the noise,
Dennis: I would say that, yeah, I mean the, obviously the noise is probably more of like a direct problem, like look to local communities. But the big fud that we've constantly been fighting or what they essentially is just like misinformation around Bitcoin mining is that it is going to strain the grid and that is going to cause grid collapse.
And the weird part about that, 'cause you could argue about energy consumption, it really just kind of [00:21:00] depends on what your opinion of Bitcoin is at that point. Because if your opinion of Bitcoin is bad, you are going to assume that the energy consumption is just writ large, a misuse of energy.
And that we run into that a lot too, right? You have to take people from Bitcoin is bad to, Bitcoin is good and that's what changes their mind around justification of the energy consumption. But one of the really, like simple but persistent, , pieces of misinformation that we see around Bitcoin mining is that they're going to collapse the grid.
And the strange part about that is that. The reason why it's so odd that continues to move on is because Bitcoin mining is actually one of the best technologies that we have on the planet. Like, no, it's not even close for balancing the grid and for making sure the grid is not strained because it is so flexible.
Like, we were talking to one of these renewable energy generators and they said, oh, you guys can shut down quickly. That's great. In case we need you to like , we can depend on you for that. And they said, well, can we warn you a day in advance? Is that enough time to warn you? And we said, you can warn us five minutes before.
Theoretically you could warn me seconds before, and I just have to have enough time to get, to the switch or to get to the remote control, [00:22:00] and they're blown away. this is time and time again. We see this with people in the energy world, people in the grid world, and the average person, when we walk them through the power of Bitcoin mining as a grid balancing technology, they're totally floored because nothing can do it like this.
I mean, batteries to an extent can do some parts of what Bitcoin mining can do. So there's a little bit of crossover there where you can help some folks understand if they're familiar with batteries, but it's the amount of load that these miners take on and the fact that they're not a battery, they're just a consumer of power, and the fact that they can just shut off instantly and make that power available to the grid when it's needed most is so, so key.
The story that we typically tell people is about Texas. Texas had two big winter storms come through. About 18 months apart. One winter storm came through winter storm uri and it took the grid to its s knees. It was almost a system wide outage or what we call like a black star across the entire state.
And if you're, not familiar with that term, it's basically like the absolute worst case scenario. Like, and it results in, when I say system wide average, like literally like the entire system is down. And when that [00:23:00] happens, you can't just turn like the power plant back on and like things start to work all magically again.
You have to like piecemeal it back together small piece by small piece and it can take weeks or months. And then while that's happening. , best case scenario, the food in your fridge is going bad. Worst case scenario, people are dying. And even though they didn't get to that point of a total system wide outage, they did have localized collapse.
And because of that, over 700 people did die in the state of Texas because of that winter storm. There are billions of billions of dollars in damages. Fast forward to the next winter Storm Elliot, and during that time period between the 12 to 18 months, roughly where there was those two winter storms, something really interesting happened.
China bans Bitcoin mining, and a bunch of Texans, , convinced a lot of Bitcoin miners to move into the state. And when they moved there, they plugged into the grid and they plugged into these pre-existing programs for balancing the grid. Well, winter Storm Elliot comes around and there was roughly 1700 megawatts of Bitcoin mining plugged in at the time.
And during that storm, nearly 100% of all Bitcoin mining across the state, switched off and made their 1700 megawatts of power [00:24:00] available to. The rate payers available to the hospitals, available to the people that needed it. Most people trying to stay warm during Winter Storm Elliot, and for putting it in context, 1700 megawatts of power is not a trivial amount of power.
It is enough power to heat 1.7 million small homes. It's enough power to energize 320 large hospitals. So, it's a huge amount of power that was delivered right back to the grid when everybody else needed it the most. The Bitcoin miners were the first line of defense to be able to provide that energy back to the grid.
And so that's a huge story that like is helps people understand just like, oh my God. Like wow, that is a lot of power that can just be made available instantly to the grid when it needs it the most and helps to sort of overcome these obstacles people have around Bitcoin mining being a strain or something that is gonna collapse the grid.
Jp: Dennis, so you mentioned the Texas storm, and one thing I wanna dive into you and get your opinion on is, the storm happens. Ercot is who runs the grid in Texas
and they fire , the head of the Ercot, , let's say market. , and they put in a new guy who, , has a different opinion on how to solve this problem.
Starts [00:25:00] attracting Bitcoin miners, seeing the regulatory environment in Ercot, the ancillary service market to step in. And I was reading articles that Bitcoin mining stabilized the grid in Texas and saved Texans $18 billion because of stopping groups like, or not needing groups like Berkshire Hathaway Energy to build these natural gas peaker plants.
How often do peaker plants come up in conversation? 'cause they are so expensive to the rate payer and they're only running or 2.9% of the time. So talk to me more about do politicians see this horrible cost of capital and cost to consumers to support the grid versus, this all new alternative, which is flexible load and having a three to 5% of load being flexible to kind of meet the same demands of the grid in consumers.
Dennis: Yeah, absolutely. It does definitely come up in conversation, but usually we're the ones bringing it up. Most people are unaware of, , the use of peaker plants or how they operate or how expensive they are. And they're also not only are they the most expensive [00:26:00] power in the world because they're only on for a very short period of time.
, they basically wait for people that are not familiar. They're these giant turbines that are sitting on idle, so they're constantly burning gas, a small amount of gas, and then when the grid is basically at a point where it just doesn't have any power left, they boot up. So it's a useful technology.
I don't wanna like, talk down to the peaker plant people too much. But, , it's a ne it's been a necessary technology , up to this
Jp: It got us to where we're today. Yeah, a
Dennis: Yeah, like, we need them, but at the same 10 sense, like Bitcoin mining is moving us past a world where we need them as much as we do, and maybe we don't, won't need them ever again in the future. If Bitcoin Mining is as successful as I think it can be as a grid balancing technology. But the boot up and like energy will be in like incredibly high numbers, like $1,600 a megawatt hour, $2,000 a megawatt hour. And so they make a lot of their money in a very short period of time by selling all that power to the grid at that moment.
But they're not only one of the most expensive types of power, they're one of the most, emissions heavy types of power. ' , it's just like you're just burning through like straight gas. So [00:27:00] if you care about the environment, if it's someone out there who cares about reducing our emissions, like peaker plants are the absolute worst option.
But they're a necessity had been a necessity in the past. But what you can do instead of course, is obviously instead of winding a peaker plant up in those times is instead have a bitcoin mine shut down. And it's much, much cheaper to pay someone to shut down than it is to pay a peaker plant to wind up.
Because they're trying to capture the top of that market. You can essentially book Bitcoin miners in advance and say, Hey, if the market takes off, if energy goes through the roof, well you be willing to shut off at X price. , and we'll put you in some sort of incentive program , to do that.
bitcoin matters are sort of like naturally price averse, so they don't wanna pay high prices. So even if they're not in one of those grid balancing programs and energy goes to, 70, 80, 90, a hundred bucks a megawatt hour, they're gonna wanna shut down just by the fact of cost avoidance.
, but sometimes it's better to have them start to, , engage in those programs earlier on. And that's why. And also to let the grid know that they can depend on them, I think is the big component. 'cause grids are like in the sense of like weatherman, like they need to predict [00:28:00] how things are gonna be going into the future.
Like, how much energy is gonna cost tomorrow. The next day they try to go out, forecast that out as far as they can when they see a big winter storm coming. Like they know that energy prices are gonna go really high and they're during those winter storms. And so , in order to improve the reliability, which is a common term in the energy sector, , they will ask people ahead of time like, Hey, will you agree to sign up for this program?
Could be a demand response program, could be primary frequency response program, and we'll pay you a little bit. To just be in the program. And then if we utilize the program, we actually ask you to shut off, then we'll pay you a little bit more. And then this is like, this is the dumb thing too, is like the pushback that people had for this too, that created a whole misinformation campaign.
Oh, the Bitcoin miners are taking advantage of the grid and getting paid , to pay, to shut off and not use the energy. It's like, yeah, , that's what the grid wants. Like they have, they want people to act in this manner. They want the bitcoin miners to be a resource. Would you rather they go to the peaker plant?
Like, most of the time it's these people that are like, sort of on the environmental side. They're like, well, this is energy that someone else could have used. Which is, that's a whole other area to go [00:29:00] into, which I don't even want to get into that one. But, , and they're causing energy to go up and then they're shutting off just in time to capture , that sort of margin.
Well, the alternative is that when energy goes through the roof, you're gonna boot up a peaker plant, which is one of the most, environmentally unfriendly technologies and also one of the most expensive technologies. So the miners are saving the grid money and they're saving them from some of their emissions output as well. It's definitely a thing where that does come up and we talk about it, but we're typically the ones who bring up the fact that peaker plants even exist and why they exist.
Jp: They are a huge, crucial component to the development of the grid, as, we were talking about. And so the fact that we kind of like gloss over them before and we don't, we're not aware of their impact is just, it's concerning to a large energy user like myself. What do you see Bitcoin mining in 2030 you mentioned as we're gonna farther integrate into grid demand response and
supporting the grid. Where's the vision? Where's the next five years taking us, Dennis?
Dennis:I've always viewed ever since reading Brandon Quims article about Bitcoin [00:30:00] mining. It's called Bitcoin is a Pioneer Species. It's really illuminating article that helps to highlight how valuable bitcoin mining is but does it through the lens of nature. Go read that article if you haven't read it yet.
But I've always viewed, ever since reading that article that Bitcoin mining is not just a tool for, balancing the grid. It's not just a piece of energy infrastructure. It's actually a tool for energy development, which means that, let's take a step back. So in order for you to build power, before Bitcoin mining existed, you always had to have a customer.
And so you'd have this like chicken and the egg problem where it's like, well, in order to build power, you need a customer. In order to get a customer, like in that area, you need the power. So there's sort of like this constant sort of like patchwork of building and matching and building and matching, power and demand or customers and finding customers.
Because if you don't have the customer, obviously your power generation site is going to not sell any power and you'll go bankrupt very quickly. These are very expensive pieces of infrastructure to build, so you always need a customer. Well, the interesting thing about Bitcoin mining coming along is [00:31:00] that now you have a customer that can go anywhere at any time, at any scale.
It can wind up, it can wind down, it can buy as much power as you want. It can turn off for as long as you want, and that's never existed before. And so essentially what Bitcoin mining has done , it has become the first ever energy development tool where you could quite literally build a power plant on the moon.
you could mine Bitcoin, right? Obviously there's some technical components to, sending the blocks and actually getting them there in time to beat the other miners. But you could build an energy asset in the Sahara Desert. You could build an energy asset in the north slope of Alaska, and you would know, even if you can't find any other customer, you can't find another large load to come in.
Maybe you're thinking you're gonna build a neighborhood 20 years in the future, and you just need to get started now. And building the energy assets out, you can do that now because of Bitcoin mining. So obviously I see Bitcoin mining as a tool to balance the grid, enhance clean energy. It's gonna do those things or is doing those things.
But the thing that it hasn't really done yet at scale. Is be used as an energy development tool. Although I do know of one project, which is very, [00:32:00] very interesting that is looking to build literally gigawatts of power and is going to use Bitcoin mining as the like jumping point for them to be able to get into that space.
Because you can't build gigawatts of power in extremely remote areas and not have customers. No one will even give you the money to do that. But now people will be interested in investing those types of projects because they know no matter what they do have that backstop or what people call the buyer of last resort with Bitcoin mining,
Jp: I think that Bitcoin mining obviously is, here to change everything and when it comes to the electricity that we utilize in our day-to-day lives, we take it for granted across the world, especially in the United States. But can you talk more about how real GDP per capita and energy consumption are correlated and just like this broader picture of stable energy for developing nations? The chicken and the egg problem in remote areas where energy is currently not stable, doesn't exist, which causes problems that people don't know, like medicine going bad because they don't have a stable grid or,
life support going off in a hospital. ' cause [00:33:00] they don't have, I run outta battery backups or to your point, just food going bad and food shortages and food poisoning. ', how is this all correlated as we zoom out to, let's say, the biological level of humans and energy.
Dennis: Absolutely. that's such a key thing that a lot of people don't realize, and we take it for granted here in the US Europe, places where we have a lot of, , availability for, purchasing power, purchasing energy. , there's a great chart. I don't have it in front of me right now, but it basically maps out all the countries and it maps out their quality of life and it's perfect representation of how the quality of life is directly matched to the amount of energy that you consume as an individual.
And so what you see is, like in places like Africa, in some of these third world countries or developing nations, is the vast majority of them, individuals do not have access to affordable power. The poorest people in the world do not have access to affordable power and then there's big consequences for that, right?
Like you said, obviously medicine is one, but just think about the ease and the difference it makes to have a refrigerator, to have a freezer. Think about the difference in your quality of life. If you [00:34:00] live in somewhere like Africa. If all of a sudden you can afford to have air conditioning on, if all of a sudden you can afford to have lights on at night so that you can study for school.
There are huge parts of the world, massive amounts of people, billions of people who are living in energy poverty. And they don't have the ability to keep the lights on. They don't have the ability to even run a blender or a microwave. And so the interesting thing about Bitcoin mining is that like we said earlier, you can now place energy generation anywhere in the world and you can have a buyer.
So the problem is if people might think, well, why not just build the energy generation and start selling it to the people? You can do that. People have tried to do that. The problem is that if you go build a power plant in the middle of a rural African village, nobody there has any electronic devices yet.
So over time, of course, they'll buy those electronic devices, start plugging into the grid and start using the power. But that's gonna take years. It could take a decade to get to the point where the energy is actually fully consumed. And so energy, I would say grids, one thing to keep in mind is they operate a lot like shopping sites, like a shopping mall.
If you go to a shopping mall, you're gonna notice lots of [00:35:00] tenants. They're full, they're doing well, the big stores oftentimes subsidize the smaller stores and they all sort of work together to create this harmonious shopping experience. If you have those big stores, pull out the tenant stores, pull out, what happens is that the landlord, the guy that owns, that shopping mall has to raise rates for everyone in order to keep the shopping mall alive in order to keep the shopping mall profitable.
Well, typically what happens is once you get to a 30% drop in vacancy, you see a what's called a death spiral. And like these malls like collapse and they can't support themselves financially anymore. That same exact thing happens with, energy consumption as well. If you build out these energy devices, if you build out energy generation and you don't have a sufficient buyer of power, what ends up happening is the rates for the people that are buying the power are extremely high.
And so they're super cost prohibitive. So, in Africa, they do this all the time. They build these little, hydro facilities, they build little energy generation sites, and the cost of power for the individual, because very few people are buying from the generator, are so high. That they just can't even afford 'em at all.
So, the beauty here is of bringing Bitcoin mining into the [00:36:00] situation is you can have them be that large tenant buyer of power to subsidize the cost of power for all the individuals on that microgrid, which is essentially what is taking place in Africa. Before Bitcoin mining existed and now it's accelerating.
I mean there's all this energy generation that's being built out all across Africa, have some really good, smart friends, really, , active friends in that space. And that's basically what they've dedicated their lives to is using Bitcoin mining as a tool for energy development in Africa. It's happening on a micro scale, but, it's really important because it's impacting people directly.
'cause instead of paying 10 x what we pay here in the United States for energy, they're only paying like maybe double or, close to like 75% more than , the average US citizen. And 'cause we have some of the cheapest energy in the world, even though our energy is expensive, it's much cheaper, , than places like rural parts of Africa or other parts of Latin America.
Jp: if, we're talking about energy in the Midwest, we're talking about remanufacturing in America, making it America, this whole tariff conversation. One thing I'm realizing, and as I work more in the energy space in the mining spaces, that we have [00:37:00] a level of, way to distribute energy that was set up in like the 1940s and thirties to energize rural America and allow farmers to have stable electricity to grow crops. This is like where the first cooperative system came out of. And in this cooperative system we have local cooperatives which serve their members and they don't handle generation of energy. They're just like the local transmission network. Then above them you have another cooperative, which actually handles generation and transmission, which is , the larger transmission lines between these cooperatives, connecting them together. That generation company connects to the power markets. But my kind of question to you, or the topic I wanna bring up is these G and ts built power plants, and let's say they built them with a 30 or 40- or 50-year outlook and the cost of the plant is tied to the current customer base and they're paying that plant. But now what's happened is the federal government came in and subsidized all of this wind and solar and so that energy market is now much cheaper than the cost of power [00:38:00] for the g and t to produce for, let's say, 95% of the time because of the nature of renewables, which creates a higher energy cost for the community. And it does create a death spiral in rural America for manufacturing because now, the loads there can't get access to the cheap energy. So they have to leave the community, which then has the community have less kilowatts being bought, which means you have higher admin cost per kilowatt hour. And what can we do with policymakers to understand this problem that, you highlighted that the affordability of power and the importance of it to community and GDP 'cause it's in rural America. It's not just Africa that's having this issue, it's in our own states and it's holding us back as a manufacturing region. Obviously, it's a huge conversation topic with tariffs right now. So how do you view making power affordable for all Americans?
Dennis: Absolutely. It's a really important component to why we have been, , such a strong country over the many years, and we need to be doing everything we [00:39:00] can to help reduce the cost of power, not just for the average individual, , but also for manufacturing. If we ever expect to bring manufacturing back.
To the United States, we're going to have competitive energy rights. We're gonna must have more energy in order to do that. I think obviously we should be doing it in the cleanest way possible. I'm a big fan of nuclear. I would love to see nuclear make a massive resurgence in the United States For too long.
We have feared nuclear energy and for too long we have pushed it to the side through very stringent regulatory procedures. And, , not only the regulations, but also the costs have gone up extremely high for building nuclear. I hope I'm very, optimistic about its future, but I think it's still one of those things where it's like, continues to be a decade out and when something is a decade out, it could easily be 20 or 30 or 40 years out. So, I do wanna see way more growth of energy here in the United States. I think it's pivotal for our success as a nation, and I think it's very shameful that we've sort of gotten to a place where we are gutting our own.
Ability to [00:40:00] keep these rural communities alive, not just because of, rates of inflation, costs of power going up, but even just energy availability. So there definitely needs to be some very smart policy, thoughts that need to be going on. There's needs to be some folks getting together and thinking really hard about how we fix this problem because we're at a place now.
Where's, like, even in, is it even fixable? We've gone so far the wrong direction for so long so there's, there definitely needs to be some thought put into that. It's not something that we have done yet at Satoshi action. We've more so just been focused on helping these states and helping these, , individual energy companies and folks in the policy space understand how valuable Bitcoin mining can be as a tool and how it can be used to help them accomplish a lot of the goals that they do wanna accomplish.
And one of the big things too is like as, manufacturing has pulled out, we've seen a lot of Bitcoin mining go in and fill the void. Utilizing underutilized energy infrastructure. And on top of that, keeping jobs in some of these rural communities. I mean, these Bitcoin mines, they don't produce thousands of jobs, but even 10 jobs in a city of a thousand people is a [00:41:00] huge difference for those communities.
And we have Bitcoin miners producing, of course, many more jobs than that in some of these small towns, but that makes a massive difference for those folks. I went to one recently, and I got to walk around the facility and I was able to ask one of the gentlemen that was there from the community, and he was just like, beaming with light because he finally had a good, hardworking job again that he could provide for his family. And he felt confident about the future and in a way that he had not felt for a very long time.
Jp: That's amazing. I mean, that's one of the things I love about building and hosting and running operations with mining store in Iowa, is that we are working with local people, training them up on it, skills that are gonna be used for the rest of their life, bringing them onto AI tools and having them take responsibility to run, the thousands of these servers.
And so bringing that purpose and meaning, to the ability for workers to have that, especially young men in these rural communities, I find is very important. , just. And is needed when it comes to like the DOE, you mentioned nuclear. I think it's something that, we need to continue to look at.
And so people that, [00:42:00] that aren't aware of why we don't have nuclear in the US it's, 'cause , there's one rule which is like when you're developing a nuclear plant, you have to, , minimize the amount of allowable radiation , that can be , received when building it. And the problem with allowable is it's a word you can redefine and so we always are redefine what allowable is and that constantly is moving the, making it much more expensive, , to deploy these facilities, which is why the DOE just came out and said, Hey, on Department of Energy land, we don't have to follow those rules. , because I guess the federal regulatory, how it's being enforced come build on our land. So they're launching like 10 different AI sites. Do you think the US government will get into. Supporting Bitcoin mining directly. We've saw Trump come out, with Bitcoin strategic reserve and all these conversations around that.
But will the federal government, in your opinion, step in and start subsidizing Bitcoin mining or energy directly? Not saying I'm advocating for that because any type of subsidy creates problems in the market, but do you see the administration, doing that and [00:43:00] also, tariffs on semiconductors, on asics. Let's jump onto that topic.
Dennis: Yeah, I mean certainly I do believe that there will be a period when the US government is very involved and interested in helping with the development of Bitcoin mining. The US government has consistently been very involved in the development of energy, and most countries are very involved from a federal, regulatory and government perspective. Nation state perspective, they're very involved in their energy sectors. I would say that the United States is one of the few countries where we do tend to have a lot more, what I call like wild, wild west approach to energy, where you can actually have people get into the business of energy. A lot of countries, they are state owned.
Like you can't, you actually cannot like drill your own, Oil Well, you cannot just have your own wind farm. Like all these things are state controlled even if you go up to, Canada or down to Mexico, like there's much, much more, control from the state around energy. So I certainly do believe that the United States well though, participate in the development and the growth of Bitcoin mining because it has so many valuable tool.
It is a valuable tool in so many different ways. Everything from balancing the grid [00:44:00] to renewables and then we didn't even touch on how it can help mitigate meth emissions from abandoned oil and gas wells and also from flared gas. And these are all things that the US government wants and knows it needs.
They know they need more energy and energy development. They know they need to fix some of the problems with wind and solar and find a different way to subsidize them. They know they need to reduce methane emissions from flared gas sites, from abandoned oil and gas sites and Bitcoin mining is a tool for all of those things.
And so it only makes sense for the US government eventually to get in, much more heavily than they are today and find ways to encourage the growth. Of Bitcoin mining all across our energy systems because it has so much value to provide everything from protecting states during winter emergencies to making sure that the average person can power their house during those emergencies and , keep the heat on.
So absolutely, I do think there's a lot of value there and I'm looking forward to the day. Maybe it's close, maybe it's far away. It's kinda one of those things again, it's like, could be next year, could be five, 10 years from now. So we'll see what, moves next [00:45:00] come from this administration and also future administrations.
Jp: And so let's jump into methane a little bit just for our viewers that aren't familiar with it. So you co-authored re. Search in the Journal of Cleaner Production highlighting the urgent need for methane mitigation. And in this study it notes that the high cost and regulatory barriers often stall mitigation projects. Talk to me more about why that is and how Bitcoin mining is like this perfect key that fits in this mitigation keyhole. But it's a key that policymakers originally didn't want and still I don't want that today. I would say, and they have closed some tax loopholes or tax advantages accessible to Bitcoin miners that are solving this problem kind of as they're noticing, oh wait, this is the wrong consumer for what we wanted to incentivize.
We're gonna close those incentives and make it much harder for them to access. Have you seen that and can you talk through anything, from your perspective of why that happened or how that's going when it comes to methane and actually accessing the incentives that are [00:46:00] supposed to be provided for that type of work?
Dennis: I mean, this is a common thing, so it's not just with methane, which I haven't seen as much of it, so I'd love for you to push me whatever you're seeing on that end. But, it has happened also with Bitcoin mining's ability to balance the grid. And it's with also Bitcoin or even things like stable coins as a disruptive technology.
Whenever a disruptive technology comes along, the people that are in the current status quo are like, oh, no, no, no. That's not why we wrote those laws. We didn't make these incentives for you. We made them for us. And so you'll typically see policies that are good for Bitcoin mining. You'll see them try to exclude Bitcoin mining from those policies or those incentive programs because they want to keep them for themselves.
The industry that is currently getting the benefit of those incentives wants to keep those incentives entirely for themself in Texas as an example, there was a bill there that they attempted to pass SB 1751. And it essentially would, almost entirely excluded Bitcoin mining from grid balancing ancillary service markets if, and that bill actually made it through the Senate and was eventually killed in the house.
And we played a major role in, defeating [00:47:00] that legislation. In fact, former Ercot, CEO, Brad Jones joined us in that fight and was able to help us make sure that bill did not make it to the governor's desk. But why would anybody wanna stop Bitcoin mining from balancing the grid or participating in grid balancing programs?
Well, because the people that were a part of those programs were eating up all the revenue from it. And when Bitcoin Mining came in, it was suppressing the revenues down for them. And so they were losing out on revenue that they were previously getting. And so they were, we believe, we didn't actually have direct confirmation of this, but it's kinda obvious if you follow the money, we believe that the energy generators and other folks that were benefiting from those programs were leaning on the state government and saying, Hey, you guys should stop these Bitcoin miners from.
Participating in these programs because, oh, they're a national security problem. They're all, these machines are made in China they're coming up with any reason that doesn't have anything to do with the grid balancing component directly. But , the ultimate goal was to kick miners outta those programs so that they could keep the revenue for themselves.
So, I'm not surprised to hear that it could be happening, with the methane side of things. But on the methane side of things, [00:48:00] the basic premise is that methane is a combustible gas. When you pull oil outta the ground, it produces associated gas called methane, and that methane can be burned.
It can also be used as fuel in an engine, which can also be used to generate electricity and mine Bitcoin. You can also get the same type of methane similar type of approach from things like landfills. Landfills, naturally produce high amounts of methane. So what we've done in the past is we've said, well, this is a really bad gas.
It's actually 25 times more that, that's the minimum amount. People think it could be, as much as 80 times more potent than CO2. And everybody's, , gets very upset about CO2 and we need to reduce our CO2 methane is way worse than CO2 , for, , making the planet warm. And so what they said is like, well, this gas is so bad for warming that we have to make sure it doesn't make it into the atmosphere, so let's just burn it.
So that's why when you go across Texas or you go buy some landfill, sometimes you'll see a big stack and some flames coming up the top. Its methane being pulled up and burned so that it doesn't go into the atmosphere. But in some cases, and especially in other parts of the world where it's not the United States where we don't have very high quality [00:49:00] environmental protections, they just vent it into the atmosphere.
There are places in the world where they are venting incredible amounts of methane, which means they're just releasing it. They're not doing anything to prevent it from, getting into the environment. both of those things are obviously the venting is way worse the flaring still has a negative component to it because it's very hard to capture and flare all the gas.
Typically, people in the space will say it's anywhere from 90 to 95%. Now the EPA will push back and say, well, that's just because they didn't build the flare the right way. But ultimately across the space we see a lack of capturing that methane coming out of those flares. Well, what you can do is you, of course you can place a Bitcoin mine there.
And you can place a generator there that consumes nearly 100%, probably closer to 99% of that methane, and then uses that as a fuel source for generating electricity. And you can use that electricity to mine Bitcoin. So in that way, Bitcoin mining is not only balancing the grid, not only, incentivizing clean energy, it's also reducing methane emissions, which is incredibly useful for not only for folks that are concerned about the climate, but also as well for groundwater and for low level ozone.
So methane is like a, [00:50:00] is a toxin. So CO2, you can breathe it, it's in everything. It's in my soda can right here. , it's safe from the perspective that it's not going to poison you if you breathe it in. Methane is completely different. It is. Poison the groundwater and it will create low-level ozone, which is toxic for human beings.
So by getting rid of methane, you're doing a very, very good thing. And Bitcoin mining is one of the best tools, if not the best tool for doing this. And we outlined the economic sort of profile on how to get it done, in the paper for clean air production, which is a peer-reviewed journal. And we were able to get that in that journal pretty recently.
And that was a big, big shock to a lot of people that we were actually able to get it across the finish line because most papers just don't even want to see this type of research. It's an old boys club in the academic world; there's a lot of gatekeeping. And if they don't like what you're trying to put forward, they just won't even let you get to the point where you can go through the review process.
We had gotten about five papers through low level journals, which are journals that are like, , we call 'em working journals, like journals where you can just sort of like, you don't get a, like a big thumbs up or you, it's not like a gold star if you get it in there, but it's like, okay, it's cool.
You got, at least you got it across the finish line. At least you got something done. But we had never [00:51:00] gotten one into a high tier journal, and this is the first high tier journal that we did that with. It was led by Dr. Murray Rudd, who of course is our, world class researcher. That helps us to get these papers out and definitely you should have 'em on some time. If you think it would be valuable to learn more about the paper.
Jp: Yeah, I mean, I'd love to dive into it and do a deep dive in, into methane gas. And just to, for , for the listeners, like there's , 147,000 million cubic meters of flare volume of gas from the World Bank dot org's website, Bitcoin mining. When we're talking about energy usage, , it's, we're always like, oh, it's using all the energy, but. It's a pioneer species, like you said, it's going directly to this methane area where no one can use this energy and it's using it. And if we were to tap all of that gas, , , the Bitcoin mining network would be solving a huge problem, would be growing more decentralized, more resilient, and it's not even gonna make a dent in the energy consumption of other people or the ability for other people to consume energy.
So that's this fundamental, I think, misunderstanding that we have is that we have an abundance of energy. We actually have so much energy, we don't know what to do with it. The problem isn't energy [00:52:00] production or electricity. It's simply transmission. And most of the time politically, not allowing you to buy the cheapest energy or the most efficient energy, or the cleanest energy for yourself because of just the decades of, what do you call it, legislation
Dennis: Yeah. Policy on top policy of that has led to this environment we're in you made a great point too, just I think, I'm pretty sure someone did a paper one time that showed that just in the United States there is enough methane gas. That is going unutilized either through flaring or venting to power the entire Bitcoin network.
So it's not like, if we had the right policies in place, like in theory you could like create an environment or an ecosystem where bitcoin mining is only using energy that no one else is using, which I actually think it is gonna go further and further that direction. That's gonna happen with stranded wind and solar.
It's gonna happen with stranded methane or just stranded natural gas. , because , the main reason why is because the hash prices are constantly crashing and hash. Price is a measure of like how much you get, you earn. For every time that you [00:53:00] hash a Tara hash or a peta hash, like of Bitcoin mining compute, and that margin is continuing to crash and crash and crash and crash over time, especially as hash rate explodes.
And the difficulty continues to go up and then they're having every four years. So all three of those things have, an impact on the amount that a miner can earn from the work that they do. And what's gonna happen is it's going to eventually become, in my opinion, almost impossible to buy energy off of the grid unless we create programs that encourage that because mining is such a valuable resource for balancing the grid, but it's really gonna start shoving it into these pockets where no one is using the power. That can be a stranded wind farm, that can be a stranded solar farm that could be stranded natural gas that nobody can get access to. So that is where I see the energy development is one component of it.
But the other big component of it is absolutely this idea that, there is so much energy in the world that's not being used. I think they, there's numbers are like 30% of all the energy that we produce goes wasted or something like that. I'd have to look up the number again. It could be even much higher than that, but there's so, so, so much energy that nobody [00:54:00] is using and Bitcoin mining is an extremely powerful tool for using the energy that no one else does and creating value out of it.
Jp: I think it's important because when we're talking about energy, it's not like we're talking about, a resource like oil or water, which I can put in a barrel and let it sit for decades and then use it.
This is a resource that needs to be stored, it needs to be used. And even if you're storing it, you're losing 2% a day in a battery. So, you're not able to keep it forever. So, and it needs to be used immediately. And most people I don't think realize that and most policy makers don't realize that. They view it as this like, resource that I can call on at any time. It's a wizard magic and it always works. Which is something that I would say switching topics, stable coins you guys just sent out an email today on acting now getting, interest in the hands of the American people from these stable coins. And talk to me more about policymaking. In the stable coin space, it's been, interesting because you've had other players, let's say, pushing their own interest that are also crypto native [00:55:00] companies or crypto native organizations that maybe don't want interest in the hands of the consumers.
And it sounds like Social Action Fund is taking the right, backing, an approach telling Congress to support, interest-bearing stable coins that are safe and protected by, safe assets like treasury nodes.
Dennis: Yeah, absolutely. And so we get a lot of questions about stable coins recently. Lot of interest as in like people caring about the topic and caring about the policy. We ultimately found that there were two really important components to stablecoin legislation that we felt needed to be changed.
They have the federal, policies of the Genius Act or the stable Act moving through Congress right now. And there are two big problems in those policies. One is that both bills actually ban the ability for stable coin issuers to offer yield to their consumers or their customers. And it's funny because I talked to a lot of Bitcoin miners, and I know a lot of Bitcoin miners use stable coins all the time.
It's very, very common in the space. I mean, it's probably a preferred method of payment for most of them. And even in the Bitcoin space, the crypto space were large, it is a very much a preferred method of payment. In fact, [00:56:00] stable coins just overtook visa in the amount of transaction volume that they did in 2024.
So there is a massive amount of demand and utilization of this technology, and we wanna make sure it's the most innovative technology possible. So right now, if you go take your money, you put it into a bank, you high have a high interest checking account, you can earn, 1, 2, 3, 4%, 5% depending on the economy that we're in, depending on the bank that you go to.
And that is completely legal. And the way that they do that, when you put your money in the bank, they take that money and they go and they give out loans. So they earn interest off that, which can be anywhere from, 4%, 7%, not too long ago. Interest was even much higher than that.
You can also make, generate yield off of it by getting treasuries, or by buying bonds. If you buy debt. If you, , if you issue debt and someone else comes along and buys that like a bank, they can generate yield off that and , the banks are allowed to turn around and say, Hey, in order to get you to come be a customer of ours, we're gonna offer some of this yield that we've generated off the loans, off the bonds, off the treasuries that we [00:57:00] have engaged in as a way to sort of market to you.
Because otherwise you just have this ecosystem where there's only a few big banks, which, is an environment we've headed much closer to more recently. But all that is completely legal. What they're trying to do is they're trying to say that exact same process. Is illegal for a stable coin issuer to participate in.
And it's not really as much I would say, the issuers or the people that are in the space. I would say it's the banks. The banks are the ones that are saying we don't want stablecoin issuers to be able to compete with us. And so we don't, we want congress to ban the ability for these stablecoin issuers to compete with this sound pretty familiar. We just talked about how in Texas they tried to ban the ability for Bitcoin miners to compete in ancillary service markets and grid balancing programs. They are trying to do the same exact thing right now in stablecoin legislation. They want to ban the ability for stablecoin issuers to participate in this space.
They have a whole system of regulations that they're trying to implement for what they call payment stable coins. And payment stable [00:58:00] coins are just what they sound like. It is a dollar for dollar backed stable coin. So the stable coin represents the exact equivalent of a dollar and it's used for payments.
And what they've done is they said, okay, here's all these regulations to allow this stuff to exist, but we're going to ban the ability for stable coins to offer the same level of. , customer service and rewards that a traditional bank could, because we wanna protect those banks. But, the most interesting thing about all this as well, is that none of these rules apply to the banks.
So if the bank wants to launch a stable coin of their own, if they wanna have their own stable coin and offer interest to people, they can, but the stable coin issuers cannot. So it's definitely this very interesting environment we found ourselves in where the politics has become a problem.
Obviously, lawmakers, regulators, all the people in the space, the issuers, the folks that are participating in this ecosystem, everybody gets it. Yes, of course, they should be able to earn yield off of these, treasuries, off of the bonds, off of anything else that these people are doing. But they won't even allow, even the most riskless, which is like short, dated treasuries.
[00:59:00] They won't even allow that to take place. They want, no ability for stable coin issuers to participate in offering yield to their customers and ultimately, that's gonna hurt the customer. That's gonna hurt the consumer. It's gonna hurt the American consumer. Roughly $7 billion in interest was generated last year alone from stable coins.
And if stable coins are going to where I think they're gonna go, which is that they're gonna 10 x in at least the next five to 10 years at bare minimum , they're already surpass visa, so they're gonna go much higher. I think it's, in my opinion, this is a total revolution of banking system like stable coins are going to, once this type of regulation gets in, passed, is gonna completely reshape the banking sector and the way that we engage in finance for a variety of reasons.
But if stable coin's 10 x, that's $70 billion that cannot go back into the hands of consumers and will only sit in the hands of really, really large issuers and really, really large banks, we think that is a mistake. And we think that in order for this innovation to be truly experienced, the innovation that stable coins have to offer, that we need to be pushing Congress to say that we should allow for stablecoin to offer yield to their customers.
Jp: And I couldn't agree more [01:00:00] on that point. Dennis and I wanted to dive in for the listener a little bit more about this concept of, really what we're talking about is like narrow banking and it came out in , the 1930s and it's the idea that the bank holds on. Hundred percent reserves against the deposit, which means they don't use the deposits for lending and investments, as you mentioned.
A traditional bank would lend out your money, pay you savings, and so this idea. That we have two systems of banking. One that would happen in the 1930s of narrow banking that didn't take off because it didn't have the technology behind it. And then the system today we have of banking, which requires a lot of trust and has bailouts all the time, and banks going under. So stable coins are saying, we have figured out how to make narrow banking really profitable and alone. We've also figured out how to give potentially interest to other people participating in this ecosystem that use our narrow bank. So it seems like in the energy markets we have this separation of the old energy. , guard in the new energy guard of Bitcoin miners and consumers and AI data centers to con and the same thing here, [01:01:00] the old banking groups and the new narrow banking groups like tether making more than BlackRock in, in a in profit last year. , and that's just like the craziness of the world is we're seeing the shift.
And to your point, the legacy groups are holding on by their dear life of saying, clawing back any type of good incentive that could exist, or could come outta these technologies and saying, no, we need them for ourselves. We don't let the consumer to have them. So how do consumers, step up and , make it dent or make an action, to impact this policy changes. What should they do? What's the first step they can take to get involved in Bitcoin advocacy?
Dennis: We offer a variety of ways that people can do that. Right now we are working on a letter writing campaign to push back on the bans on stable coins. , recently we've done letter writing campaigns to help push state lawmakers and federal lawmakers to support strategic bitcoin reserve legislation.
So there's a lot of opportunities that we've done about 11, this is our 12th campaign, I should say. In the last 18 months, we've had over 220,000, I think almost 230,000 letters be written in those 12 campaigns that we've done. And it's important for people to [01:02:00] make their voice heard. I mean, , just a couple days ago, there was a hearing in Oklahoma where someone on a committee switched their vote.
They said it live during the hearing. They said, the reason I'm went changing from a no to a yes is because some of my constituents reached out to me and explained why this policy is important. And so I'm switching from a no to a yes because of that. So your voice as an individual voter can have a massive impact on your lawmaker, much more than you thought possible.
But you have to actually make your voice heard. You have to actually write letters. You have to actually call your representative. You have to call your leaders and let them know where you stand. And especially with this new technology, it's really important because you might understand the value of the technology.
You might see how important Bitcoin, Bitcoin mining, stable coins is for the future of the United States. But these state lawmakers and these federal lawmakers oftentimes haven't even had someone approach their office to talk about the issue. And so, if you are able to get in there and talk to them and you're even just a constituent, you don't even need to be a great educator.
You're just a constituent. That can add a lot of value because they're hearing directly from the people that vote for them. And at the end of the [01:03:00] day, the votes are what get these people in office. And if they think that their constituents care about an issue, they're gonna change their viewpoint on something, especially if it's something they haven't set their viewpoint on.
Now, if you're gonna go try to talk to Elizabeth Warren, you're gonna have a really hard time getting a meeting. They don't take meetings with anybody that likes crypto so that'll be tough even if you're a constituent. But if you're a lawmaker or you're a regulator, or anybody that you know is in the political space that you can get a connection to and get a call with, or get a phone call with, and they haven't set themselves up as like an anti-crypto person, you have a very good chance of helping to shape the way that they view the technology.
Jp: So it's grassroots, it's making the phone calls, writing the emails, and I've done a few of those letters. I just wanna let people know it's not that hard. You guys make it easy to send a letter to the right. People and, to sometimes follow a template that can help us educate what the viewpoint of our industry is.
So thank you for doing that, and really appreciate the support that Satoshi action has put out for miners and for everyone in the crypto space. highlighted the strategic reserve bill. I just saw you were in Utah recently, helping with that [01:04:00] bill. Who's the first state to pass it? First one that comes to mind.
Dennis: There are a few states that are really well still positioned to do it. We've actually stopped talking about who are the most well positioned because it's actually started to hurt us. , , on the airwaves, who we think is gonna pass it first, those states have actually started receiving calls from people that don't like what we're doing, and convinced people to go the other direction.
So, I think there's certainly some states out there that people are probably pretty aware of. You can go do, dig around and you can find it. Obviously Arizona is one of them, but, , and Texas , but there's a couple other that people don't know about that we don't wanna publicize too much.
So, we're keeping our cards close to our chest so we can actually get it across the finish line. honestly, there's like way too many people paying attention to this stuff back when I did this first asset rights, like nobody cared. Like they cared when we got the bill passed.
Like, but it wasn't this big like investigative series on like where we are in the process. Like now there's like an entire tracker that like auto tracks, like every single bill, every part in the process where it is they like do an amazing job. It's called bitcoin laws.io. Love the website. But it's like people are seeing like real time, like what is happening and they're paying a lot of attention.
And [01:05:00] actually it's caused a lot of people that don't like what we're doing to pay attention and try to stop us from getting these bills across the finish line, which we know for a fact has actually killed, two of the bills this year alone. It's happened before, but we've not had it happen in the scale that it is. So, we're trying to be a little more careful about sharing information because it is going to impact our ability to get it across the finish line. But we're very optimistic that at least one, if not two states will pass it into law this year.
Jp: I'm super excited to move to one of those states,
Dennis: Yeah.
Jp: but to your point, this this visibility is, hard. It's like , you wanted support and that was like what you were built the organization on and now you're realizing like, actually I'm highlighting and people are realizing that they don't, some people are realizing that this is, they don't want this 'cause they maybe don't understand the technology and the benefit of Bitcoin and how it's like one of the greatest saving vehicles on earth, but. They have a voice too, and in democracy, their voice matters, which is important. And I never want to disregard that, even if someone has an opposing opinion on me, as long as they're, , factually stating, deploying their voice in a cordial way, I think it should be recognized [01:06:00] and respected.
How are you viewing, like, I guess this across the aisle, communication and what tips or what do you take to bridge that gap with these lawmakers or even other citizens that don't think Bitcoin should be on the balance sheet of the states?
Dennis: Yeah, so there is an increased level of bipartisanship happening in the space. I'd like to see that. We'd love to see more of it, and we're working actively, we're very nonpartisan or bipartisan in our approach, so we're always working with both sides of the aisle. Obviously, Republicans are way out in the lead when it comes to advocating for the technology, but there are a lot of Democrats who have learned a lot in the last couple years about Bitcoin and digital assets, and you're gonna see an increasing number of Democrats come out in support of the technology as time goes on.
Jp: It's just a matter of time until everyone's orange peeled and sees the future.
Dennis: I always say we are gonna go from a world where we're debating whether or not we do Bitcoin to a world where we debate how we do Bitcoin.
JP: I love it. Dennis, what other one-liners do you have, if any, to [01:07:00] throw out the show before we end it for the day?
Dennis: I don't know. I'm not good at one-liner recall unless it, there's a question that just sort of like, makes me think of it. But absolutely. I think that people need to just realize how important it is to engage with their local lawmakers, to engage with folks that are in those positions of power. They can make a real massive meaningful difference.
We've lost votes by one vote. We've lost, lawmakers that support the work that we're doing, that are supporting, that are sponsoring our legislation by three votes. Like they lost their election by three votes. So, by being engaged and by being active, there is a way to make a massive difference and to also show the world that the United States, is going to be a leader on this technology now and far into the future, but you have to be engaged. And, if you're not engaged, I would say like some people are like, I just hate politics. I don't want nothing to do with it. Be a builder in the space because if you're building something in the space and you have success in the space and building something, it gives us in the political space things to point to and say, look at all this great stuff that's going on, and we wanna keep it all here in the United States.
Jp: I love it. If you're not advocating, you must be building.[01:08:00] And you're not building, you must be producing content about this world. So, last question. What is your content routine? You're active on Twitter, are you just like, every day, 10 reminders to tweet? Or how do you manage Twitter? Email, podcast, YouTube. Tell me like, end it on that.
Dennis: There's no science to, it's more of an art. I don’t have like a quota that I need to meet. I just, whenever something resonates with me, I craft 100% of my own personal tweets., we have multiple people that oversee the Satoshi action account. And when it comes to spaces or anything like that, it's sort of just impromptu.
I was for a while, last year in, going in from December to January was basically accepting any podcast invitation that came my way. So actually you're one of the first podcasts long form podcast I've done in a very long time because I've been trying to actually a long time for me. I've been trying to focus on the work and getting things done, but I think I'm gonna start opening it up, but you're the first one to hear from me in long format for probably like four months.
Jp: I'm excited, to launch a dentist, and as always, it's like great to connect with you. It's great to see [01:09:00] you along this journey as we both build, \ , two different companies in this space and try to lead them to wealth creation for us and our employees and for the broader ecosystem. So thanks again for all the work you and Satoshi Action Fund do.
Dennis: And thank you too, man. You've been in this space a long time you're the first guy to make Bitcoin mining Cool. To the average person, and you advocate too. You're out there in the political space advocating and building. So, I gotta get up to your level soon.
Jp: Gotta get on Dr. Phil, me and you.
Dennis: That's right. That's what I know. I finally made it.
Jp: Awesome. Well thanks again guys for listening and remember to mine on and keep stacking SATs.